Shadows of Discovery by Brenda K. Davies
Chapter Twenty-Four
The sun bakedCole’s flesh until it blistered before splitting open. Sand caked his swollen, dry eyes, but he’d given up trying to wipe it away. It was impossible to keep the small grains out of them.
Sometimes the particles drifted up over his ankles; at other times, the sand was hardpacked beneath his feet and crunched with every step. The blood trickling from his swollen and broken lips dripped off his chin. He didn’t bother trying to stop it.
Dried blood caked on his arms as more of his flesh split open beneath the onslaught of the unrelenting sun. His head throbbed so much that each beat of his heart pounded in his temples and blurred his vision.
He had no idea where he was in this land, if he was going the right way, or wandering in circles. He kept going because the alternative was death.
He’d long ago lost sight of Aelfdane and Auberon. Maybe they were still out there baking and blistering beneath the sun, or perhaps they succumbed to it days ago. He didn’t care either way.
As the hours and what he assumed were days passed, there was no end in view from the sea of golden brown surrounding him. His body tried to heal with every passing step, but it was becoming more beat down by his growing hunger and thirst.
In the beginning, he briefly considered turning into the wolf so he could traverse the land faster, but these were trials for the dark fae. A lycan wouldn’t pass them; there was no way the magic at work here would let that happen. Besides, running through this wasteland with a heavy coat on him probably wouldn’t help with the heat.
One of the blisters on his neck popped and sizzled when the liquid oozing from it baked on his flesh. He didn’t dare touch his skin. It hurt bad enough without feeling the pressure of his fingers against it.
He pondered taking his shirt off to cool himself a tiny bit more as sweat and blood cleaved it to his body. However, he refused to give the sun one more centimeter of exposed flesh to destroy.
Dust and sand clogged his nostrils and choked his mouth. He would gladly kill someone for a sip of water, as the sand in his throat made it feel as if he’d eaten razor blades.
When he came over the top of a hill, the sand rose almost to his knees, and he staggered and nearly went down. He caught himself before he toppled into the sand. If he went down, he wasn’t sure he would make it up again.
Occasionally, he glimpsed bones in the distance but never went to explore. Sometimes, he believed those bones were dragging themselves through the sand, but it was impossible to tell reality from fiction anymore.
Stopping, he bent his head as he tried to find some reprieve from the unrelenting sun. There was none.
The sun never set in this hellhole.
He craved the cool nights of the Gloaming and the silvery rays of its four moons. He longed to wrap the cool embrace of shadows around him.
Imagining them encompassing his body helped ease some of his misery, but no matter how clearly he pictured the coolness of the shadows in his mind, it wasn’t enough to chase away the heat.
He considered taking a small break but didn’t know if he would have the energy to get up again. He hadn’t stopped in days, and he was so exhausted he swore he fell asleep on his feet.
The imaginings of Lexi kept him moving. Forcing one foot in front of the other, he focused on her as he trudged through the sand sucking at his legs. He recalled her strawberry scent and how the sun brought out deep, vibrant red and gold strands in her auburn hair.
The taste of her kiss replaced the grainy sand on his lips. Her laughter drowned out the rush of blood in his ears as she gazed up at him with amusement in her twinkling, hunter green eyes. In his mind, he traced every one of the freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose.
The image of her was so real she drew him onward as she beckoned to him with the crook of her finger. A dim part of him realized he was lost to delirium, and the rest of him didn’t care.
She was here. He was almost to her. If he could just touch her, then….
When a whirling, crashing, sucking sound drowned out the sound of her laughter, Cole stopped. Lexi continued to shimmer before him until a sound like nails raking a chalkboard pushed her out of his mind.
It sounded like the land was tearing itself apart as the ground beneath his feet quaked. And when Lexi vanished, her absence revealed the wave of earth cascading toward him. Cole’s nostrils flared as the barren wasteland suddenly became a crashing ocean of sand.
Unable to trust what he was seeing, Cole lifted his blistered and bloodied hands to wipe away the sand caking his eyes. The movement caused more of his flesh to rip open, and a mixture of more blood and ooze spilled down him.
Once he cleaned his eyes the best he could, Cole lowered his arms again and focused on the desert. The waves of sand were still rushing toward him, but when he glanced over his shoulder, only serene desert remained.
He was not hallucinating this sudden change of events or the shrieking noise threatening to rupture his eardrums.
He could turn and flee back into the desert, but if he did, he would spend an eternity roaming this land. He would continue to burn and bleed until the sun and sand eroded the skin from his muscles and then the muscles from his bones.
If he turned back, he wouldn’t get the chance to face whatever this was again. And he suspected this was the key to defeating this trial. If he turned back, it was only a matter of time before he became nothing more than a skeleton, dragging itself across the earth in search of escape.
The bones he’d glimpsed before weren’t an illusion created by a mind rotting from the sun. That was what would become of him if he ran from this sea of sand.
How many dark fae are out there, crawling through the desert, dead but still living an existence far worse than death?
It wasn’t a question he wanted an answer to, and it was a fate he wouldn’t allow to befall him, no matter how thirsty, exhausted, burnt, and pain-filled he was.
The waves were only a hundred yards away now and rising higher before crashing into the sand. The earth quaked more violently, and the shrieking noise drowned out all other sounds.
Cole gathered what little strength remained and ran toward the waves.